Anthony Fauci's China Investments Revealed

The spat between Sen. Roger Marshall (R-KS) and Dr. Anthony Fauci continued this week when the White House's chief medical adviser was accused of holding "significant investments" in China.

The pair clashed during a recent Senate committee hearing over Fauci's salary and financial records. The senator requested and received further financial disclosures, which he then published through his office on January 14.

During a Fox News appearance on Tuesday, Marshall told Sean Hannity that Fauci had lied about his financial records being publicly accessible. Fauci said his earnings have been a matter of public record for nearly four decades.

"But now we know why. Dr. Fauci and his spouse made almost $2 million during 2020," Marshall said. "So during 2020, you'd recall, if you were a bartender or a barber, you couldn't make a living, but Dr. Fauci managed to squeak together almost $2 million."

"A significant amount of these investments are investments in China and Hong Kong," said Marshall. Asked again by Hannity, the senator said: "He had significant investments in China through one of his mutual funds."

A Newsweek review of the documents Fauci supplied to Marshall showed only one connection to China, through the Matthews Pacific Tiger Fund run by California-based investment firm Matthews Asia.

According to the company's third-quarter report, 42.7 percent of the fund traded in "China/Hong Kong" stock, including household names Tencent and Alibaba. However, second on the country list was Taiwan, at 16 percent. In fact, Taiwan's TSMC—the world's leading semiconductor manufacturer—topped the fund's company holdings at 6.4 percent.

TSMC, which the United States sees as a critical player in the restructured supply chain of the post-pandemic era, is in the process of building a fabrication plant in Phoenix, Arizona.

Fauci's additional disclosures showed that between 2019 and 2020, he owned shares valued in the hundreds of thousands in the Matthews Pacific Tiger Fund, but his unrealized gains were only in the tens of thousands. His investments in the fund returned cash dividend that ranged from several hundred to just over $1,500.

Overall, Fauci appeared to put in more than he took out. The documents showed short- and long-term reinvestments in the thousands of dollars in December 2020.

On January 15, Adam Andrzejewski, head of the transparency group OpenTheBooks, wrote in Forbes that the Fauci household's net worth exceeded $10.4 million—$8.4 million under Fauci and $2.1 million under his wife, Christine Grady. Indirect investments linked to China would appear to make up a small portion of that amount.

The Fauci family earned $1.77 million in federal income, benefits, royalties and investment in 2020, Andrzejewski's analysis showed.

"Some on the right have speculated that Fauci may have profited off the pandemic. The disclosures show that he's invested in fairly broadly targeted mutual funds, with no reported holdings of individual stocks," he wrote.

Fauci has become public enemy number one in conservative circles following clashes with a number of Republican lawmakers over the National Institutes of Health's ties with so-called "gain-of-function" research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, where former President Donald Trump and others believe the coronavirus escaped to infect and kill millions across the globe, including some 850,000 Americans.

However, the exact origin of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, remains unclear, with the Chinese government having already rejected the WHO's phase two origin-tracing proposal last summer.

Members of the GOP say they want more transparency between federal funding and research in foreign countries. In addition, Sen. Marshall plans to introduce the FAUCI Act in order to mandate unredacted financial disclosures.